


Death Smiles Back

by fearnotthedemons



Category: Batman: A Death in the Family - Fandom, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Red Hood: Lost Days
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, au where everything is just how i like it bc i do what i want, i'm killing this clown!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 10:13:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22848475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearnotthedemons/pseuds/fearnotthedemons
Summary: “Is that what you think this is about? Your letting me die?” he asks, equal parts bitter and disbelieving and horrible, horrible laughter. “I don’t know what clouds your judgement worse, your guilt or your antiquated sense of morality.” He shakes his head, slowly and deliberately rising from the ground to look his father in the eye. “Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why - why on God’s earth - is he still alive?!”or5 times Jason Todd tried to kill the Joker and the 1 time he succeeded
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32





	Death Smiles Back

> “You remain unavenged.”
> 
> -Talia al Ghul

***

Jason Todd is nineteen years old when he tries to kill the Joker for the first time. 

He’s spent the past two years of his life training for it. (Is it a life anymore? Can you call it that after you’ve died? After you’ve come back something else?) He knows the terrain, he knows the plan, and he knows the Batman will be there every step of the way trying to stop him. The only thing he doesn’t know is how it will feel to be on the other end of the crowbar, this time. 

The carnival is empty when he creeps in under cover of darkness. With the lights out and music silent it feels more graveyard than playground, and he almost lets out a bitter chuckle at the thought. Almost. Instead, he tightens his grip on the cold steel in his hand and stalks into the empty funhouse.

Upon entering he mentally skims through the memorized floor plans and turns left down a hallway lined with mirrors, each more warped and distorted than the last. Memory itches at the base of his skull at the sight. A much younger Jason had once walked these halls, sneaking into a show his parents could never afford to take him to, marvelling at the way the mirrors filled out his scrawny frame. Now he tries not to look. But the reflection follows him down the corridor, contorting and twisting until Jason is sure he would recognize himself in the distressed glass if he dared face it. Each step sends another sick feeling crawling across scarred, undead flesh. He can feel his scalp prickle where the trauma left his hair white.

It takes everything in him to keep moving forward at a controlled pace while his body screams warnings. This is what happened last time. Last time when his mind filled with circus lights and he smelled blood and iron and felt the crunch of broken bones and laughter, so much laughter, high pitched, terrible laughter that pierces his ears and his mind and his heart and Daddy isn’t coming to save you, Little Bird, little— hah ahah ahahahAHAHAHAHA— 

The corridor ends.

He stands at the edge of the room gasping for air beneath his helmet. Pressed up against the wall, he braces himself and runs through the arsenal of weapons strapped to his body until he feels safe again. _No_ , he corrects himself. _Not safe. In control._ It takes the crowbar in his hand, the handguns in his thigh holsters, and the throwing knives in his sleeves for him to come back to himself. The serrated blade tucked in his boot allows time for his eyes to adjust to their new surroundings. He takes a deep, steadying breath and continues. 

Joker’s white face paint is impossible to miss even in the dim moonlight that filters through the top of the tent. He sits up against a garishly painted wall, unshaven and hungover by the look of it. The unnatural green of his hair has gone a brownish grey at the roots and his makeup is smudged. Honestly, if Jason didn’t know any better he’d think the man before him was just another circus drunk. 

(He does know better. He does, he does, he does.)

He tightens his grip on the crowbar and steps forward into the light. 

“Tell me who you are... or I’ll kill you,” Joker slurs. When Jason doesn’t respond he lifts his head to glare. “You think I’m kidding?” 

Jason sends silent thanks to a god that’s long since abandoned him that his hand is steady as he raises the crowbar high into the air, moonlight glinting dangerously on metal. “No,” he snarls, sarcasm biting his raw throat, “I’d _never_ think that.”

Caught unawares, there’s nothing Joker can do but cry out as Jason lifts the crowbar again and again, bringing it down with brutal, bone-crushing force. His vision hazes at the edges until the world narrows down to him, the Joker, and the metal bar in his hands now slick with blood. 

Manic laughter echoes around his mind and threatens to spill from his lips, and it’s only when Joker finally loses consciousness that he stops.

A sharp, cruel smile curls his lips as he stands over the body of the man that broke him. “Tell me,” Jason says, “how does that feel?” 

***

Darkness has fallen on Gotham once again. Crime Alley in all her glory lies beneath the abandoned apartment complex Jason and his hostage are holed up in, purring with late night activity. The buzz of glitching neons leads a medley of harsh laughter, flicked cigarette butts, and the click of hooker’s heels on cracked pavement. Without the helmet, his domino mask does nothing to filter the smell of rainwater, piss, and cheap perfume.

Call it cliché, call it _poetic justice_ , but Jason doesn’t see any other way for it to end.

He had tried to steal the hubcaps off the batmobile’s tires in this very alley. Thirteen years old, wiry, and painfully thin, he’s sure Bruce was as surprised he could physically pry the parts from the vehicle as he was that he had the audacity to try. A lifetime later he stands taller, fuller, weighed down by full meals and trauma and scars. He knows Bruce barely recognizes him, and wonders how much of that is the Pit and how much is a product of what he’s become. 

Speak of the Devil, the Dark Knight swoops in almost silently under the cover of darkness and stands opposite his son for a long moment. The first words out of his mouth are entirely predictable. “I’m not going to let you kill him.” A Batman classic, taking him back to the countless times he’d been lectured on hitting too hard, too harsh, too cruel. 

Jason feels his own mouth twist into something between a smile and a snarl. “You can try to stop me,” he says. (Maybe he should’ve hit even harder then. Would it have saved him? Will it now?)

The ensuing fight is bloody. Brutal. No holds barred. From the slimy rooftops Jason isn’t quite sure are structurally sound to inside the crumbling building itself, father and son do their worst. The sparring is as verbal as it is physical, each man fighting in the past and the present, trying to figure out who his opponent is and who he is and why neither is pulling his punches all between the exchange of vicious right hooks. 

In his every action, however violent, it is so painfully obvious that Bruce is trying to rescue whatever’s left of his second son the only way he knows how. Jason is… he’s trying to… 

In so many ways he’s still the fifteen year old boy who died screaming for a father who never came. 

With his emotions swirling, Jason’s focus slips long enough for a well-timed swing to leave him flat on the ground, nose bleeding and air knocked out of his lungs. The room swims in his vision and his nose is full of the rot of the floorboards. Bruce stands over him, panting silently. “I know I failed you,” he starts, “but I tried to _save_ you, Jason. I’m… I’m trying to save you right now.”

Jason makes a gurgling sound in the back of his throat. Bruce’s face shifts into a mix of shock and horror when he realizes it’s a low, wheezing laugh. As Jason sits up, he turns on Bruce with a gun in his hands and a wild look in his eyes. 

“Is _that_ what you think this is about? Your letting me die?” he asks, equal parts bitter and disbelieving and horrible, horrible laughter. “I don’t know what clouds your judgement worse, your guilt or your antiquated sense of morality.” He shakes his head, slowly and deliberately rising from the ground to look his father in the eye. “Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But _why_ \- why on God’s earth - is _he_ still alive?!” 

Jason’s final words are enunciated by a solid blow to the decomposing wooden panels holding the room together, all of them snapping and crumbling and falling to the ground to reveal the Joker sitting tied to an old chair and enough explosives to blow up the block in just the room over.

Bruce’s eyes widen and Joker _laughs_. He laughs and laughs and laughs, and Bruce can’t tell if Jason sounds like Joker or if Joker sounds like him.

The gun is pointed at the clown, now, used to gesture wildly as Jason goes on. “Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he’s crippled, I thought--” He stops, furiously scrubbing at the tears which threaten at the corners of his eyes. “I thought killing me-- that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt. Because if it had been the other way around? If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass, left in agony, taken from this world? I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic, evil, death-worshipping _clown_ and sent him off to Hell.” 

Jason’s eyes dart and roll frantically, like a cornered animal’s. The whites of them stand out starkly against his dark domino mask. His breathing is heavy. If he listens closely he can hear circus music past the rush of blood and ringing in his ears.

(So long. He’s been chasing this moment for so long, and the whole time his hero, his mentor, his _father_ never understood--)

Bruce is furious. Jason can see it in the line of his shoulders, in the snarl not hidden by his mask or his self-control, in the betrayal that flashes in his eyes. “You don’t understand. I don’t think you’ve ever understood.”  
  


“What?” Jason mocks, the gun pointed at Bruce now. “Your moral code won’t allow for that? It’s too hard to ‘cross that line’?”

“ _No_. God almighty, no. It’d be too damned easy.” The world stands still. For a moment, a father and a son and a killer live in a moment of complete and absolute understanding. It’s broken when Bruce continues, quietly, “But if I allow myself to go down into that dark place, I’ll never come back.”

As soon as he hears those words Jason’s expression shutters closed, any trace of closeness already a forgotten memory. “ _Why?_ ” he demands, eyes flashing.

Bruce doesn’t know what he’s done wrong, but he can feel that once again the universe is hanging by the tiniest of threads. “What?” 

Jason runs a frustrated hand through his hair, white streak catching the low light of the moon that comes in through broken windows. “I’m not talking about killing Cobblepot and Scarecrow or Clayface, not Riddler or Dent. I’m talking about _him_ ,” the gun jabs violently towards Joker’s ever-smiling face. “Just him. And doing it because,” his voice breaks, “because _he took me away from you_.” 

He thinks Bruce might be crying. He thinks he might be crying. But whatever the truth of the moment is, Bruce looks everywhere but towards his son or the deranged clown cackling to himself in the corner. Eyes downturned, Bruce turns ever so slightly towards the door, casting a signature Batman silhouette against the exposed walls. “I can’t. I’m _sorry_. I just can’t.”

Joker coos. Jason sneers. “You won’t have a choice.” He slides a gun to Batman and stands, positioning Joker in front of himself with an arm around his throat and a gun at his head and a manic smile on his face. “All you’ve got is a head shot.”

“Stop this. Enough. you know I won’t--”

“I’m going to blow his addled, deranged brains out, and if you want to stop me...”

“Please, don’t--”

“You’re going to have to shoot me.”

“ _Jason_ \--”

“Right in my face.” 

The gun is in Bruce’s hands - Batman’s hands - but Jason’s are the ones that tremble. He bares his teeth. “It’s him or me. You have to decide.”

The triumph in Jason’s expression is what scares Bruce the most. As his son - Red Hood - counts down to three, he spends some of the longest seconds of his life searching for a way out, a way to save his son, to stay true to his code, to-- 

_There_.

On the count of three, a batarang flies from Bruce’s hand, ricochets off an exposed pipe, and hits Jason squarely in the shoulder. Cursing, he hits the ground hard, incapacitated before he can make good on his threat. Joker falls from his deadly embrace with a cackle of unrestrained delight. 

“You got him!” the clown crows, “You expert, rooting-tooting, eagle-eyed, goth marksman, son-of-a-whore! Oh, _God_ \- I love it! You managed to find a way to win, and _everybody_ still loses!” He’s on his feet and moving, discarded gun in his hands before Batman realizes what’s going on, preoccupied as he is with Jason’s bloodloss. “Except me, my dark little pumpkin pies,” Joker continues, gleam in his eyes. “ _I’m_ the one who’s gonna get what he wants tonight!”

He casts a smug, calculated look over his shoulder and a quick “Toodles!” before rushing from the building, shooting the pile of explosives intended for him in the other room on his way out. 

The building goes up in a flash of light and comes down in a hail of rubble. In the split second before impact, Bruce throws his body across the room to shield his son. By the time Jason realizes what’s going on, it’s too late, and all of a sudden he’s back in an Etheopian desert, an entirely different building coming down on him as he suffers from an entirely different set of wounds.

In a matter of seconds, the world goes dark.

_Dark_ . It’s dark. And cold. And damp. And he can’t breathe. He coughs and sputters until enough air fills his lungs to _scream_ , the panic crawling up his throat and out of his lips in the shape of a name. “ _Bruce!_ ” 

He begs, _please, please_ come save him, won’t his father save him, won’t anyone save him?! _Please, please, please_ between the scratching and the digging and the clawing of fingernails through plush velvet and mahogany and dirt. _Please, please, please_ , he can feel the splinters enter his skin, the blood swim down his fingers, the tear of another nail from its bed to expose even more raw skin to bleed even more until all he sees and hears and feels and smells and tastes is red. _Please, please, please…_

No one is coming to save him. He is no one’s son. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, there is laughter. 

***

When he wakes up, Jason is alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you recognized a lot of the dialogue, it's because I decided to reduce/reuse/recycle it for my own nefarious purposes! This will not be updated regularly, but it will be updated.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!! Comments/kudos greatly appreciated <3


End file.
